Waiting for You

Date: April 12, 2020

Sermon

Here’s a little poem by Jim Lowry to get your Easter started. 

One thing’s sure. 
What happened on Easter 
was not your usual truth. 
It was not natural. 
It was not logical. 
It was not medical. 
What happened on Easter 
was real but it was not your usual reality. 

Friends, this is not our usual reality! Nothing is normal right now. We can see the whole range of the Himalayas without the veil of smog. We can hear birds chirping in cities around the world. You are sitting at home, maybe still in your pajamas, watching worship through some sort of screen device. But here we are, on Sunday, April 12, 2020 (in case you’ve forgotten what day it is). It’s not normal, but it is Easter, and we are in need of a bit of good news. 

At first glance, that good news is not going to come from Mark’s account of Easter. It’s early, the women are sad and maybe a little cranky and undoubtedly traumatized by the suffering and death of Jesus. Nothing is how it’s supposed to be, and then this angel person shows up and tells them what they already know – Jesus is not there. 

We get that. We get the sadness, the grief over all the things we’ve lost – people, absolutely, but also some of our freedom to go when and where we please. We’ve lost graduations and proms and entire semesters. We’ve lost jobs, some of us, and lost benefits, some of us. We’ve lost track of what day it is.  

We’ve lost track of what day it is, but we know this to be a frightening time. Last Monday I did my weekly shopping, wearing a mask and latex gloves, passing others wearing masks. No one was making eye contact and we avoided each other with great diligence. Once again, there was no toilet paper, no bleach, no baker’s yeast on the shelves. I felt like I was in the middle of some sort of zombie apocalypse movie. 

Our emotional and spiritual reality feels like the emotional and spiritual reality of Mark’s Easter story, but no angels have appeared with any good news on our Facebook feeds or the nightly news. No person in dazzling white has popped into our reality to tell us not to fear, or to tell us things will be okay, or to tell us to go back wherever it was that we started because we will find the good news right there. 

Of course, I’m not sure I want to go back to where we were before all this started. Let me be clear: I do want this virus to go away. I want all those people working in healthcare to be able to go to their jobs and then come home and not worry about getting the people they live with sick. I want people to get their jobs back. I want us to be able to shake someone’s hand, or hug someone, or pass the peace of Christ. 

But I don’t want to go back to pollution, and crowded freeways, and a busyness that gives no room for rest or grace. We will get through this thing, this pandemic crisis. But maybe when this is all over, we will not go back to where we were before this all began. Rather, we will go through the crisis, and maybe we will be different when we arrive on the other side of it. 

At the end of Mark’s gospel, those brave, grieving, dutiful women are told to go back to Galilee – the place Jesus most called home. It’s where he started his ministry, gathered his disciples, taught and prayed. The young angelic man says to them, in a sense, that they will get through their crisis, their grief, and they will go on. And because of God’s great act, they will be different when they are back in Galilee. 

You could say that the gospel of Mark is a circular thing, or maybe a mobius strip – something that doesn’t really have a beginning or an end. So we go back to Galilee with those women and with the disciples, and we read the gospel again but this time we read it through the lens of resurrection. We know the end of the story, but as we do with our favorite novels, we go back and read the story again and again. 

We don’t know the end of this story, or at least of this chapter entitled “COVID-19.” But I do so hope that when the crisis is over and we go back to our usual lives and we go out to our usual places that we do so differently. Maybe we’ll come through this crisis with a deeper appreciation of our neighbors. Maybe we’ll come out of this and realize that some of our essential workers need to be paid what they’re worth, those grocery store clerks and janitors and God love them, the teachers. Maybe we’ll drive less and walk more. I hope we are different, but who knows? 

I have been hoping for a lot of things these past few weeks. Hoping that my parents and in-laws stay healthy. Hoping that you all are healthy. Hoping that hungry people are finding meals. And I realized something: that hope is future oriented but anxiety is too. A lot of us are finding our days filled with a strange see-saw of anxiety and hope, and that is normal and natural and frankly, a really good response to all of this. 

Those women who left the tomb must have felt anxiety and hope. What would the future hold? If and when they told the disciples, what would happen? If and when they went back to Galilee, who would they see? Would they really see Jesus, or was it all just a big fairy tale? 

Here is what I believe: the future is in God’s hands, or maybe a better way of saying that is that God is in our future. There’s a German theologian named Jurgen Moltmann who has written some pretty exquisite things about hope, but one particular thing he wrote caught my heart this week. He said, “…the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason [for our hope] is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for.” 

He continues. “What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God’s first love.” (The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life) 

Oh, beloved! I don’t know the end of this story of this COVID-19 chapter. But on my bad days, I imagine what it will be like. I picture Sunday worship, the pews filled, the choir processing in to one of the great hymns, and everybody trying to sing through their tears because we’re just so glad to be together. I know that at the end of this, we will be waiting for each other. We will be waiting for each other on the stoop of our houses and apartments. We will be waiting for each other in the magnificence of the sanctuary. I am even excited about waiting for you in the flickering fluorescent light of the basement rooms where our committees meet! 

At the end of it all, God will say, “You made it through. You lived your life, and I have been waiting for you. Come, have more life.”  

Indeed. Alleluia! Amen. 

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